One aspect of the proposed Iranian nuclear agreement is that Iran would turn over its 20% enriched uranium to Russia for reprocessing. Centrus Energy (when it was USEC) acted as the sole agent for selling Russian SWU under the Megatons to Megawatts Program. Maybe somebody is speculating that the agreement will be revised.

I'm not sure anyone knows how much of this enriched uranium Iran has produced.

Plants remain offline following Fukushima crisis until clearance in safety review
Published: 14 hours ago
(Anadolu Agency) A Japanese nuclear regulation watchdog created after the Fukushima disaster has accepted a report saying that a reactor at a plant on the Sea of Japan coast is situated above an active geological fault.

The report, submitted to the Nuclear Regulation Authority, explained that at least one fault under the No. 2 reactor of the Japan Atomic Power Co.’s Tsuruga plant could move in the future, Kyodo News reported.

After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis, all commercial reactors in the earthquake-prone country remain offline until their clearance in the regulator’s safety review.

It is prohibited for reactors and other safety-requiring facilities to be built directly above active faults.

(Reuters) - The European Union has backed Euratom's decision to block Hungary's 12 billion euro nuclear deal with Russia, a move that could worsen the situation between the Kremlin and Brussels, the Financial Times reported.

The decision, which was not made public, was taken at a meeting in Brussels last week, the newspaper said.

Hungary requested that Euratom, the European Atomic Energy Community, revive the decision, the newspaper said, citing people close to talks.

Russia and Hungary agreed last year to build two units with 1,200 megawatts capacity at Hungary's Paks nuclear power plant, a decision that was criticized by opposition parties.

Hungary, which relies on Russia for most of its gas and oil imports, agreed for a deal with Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom to build the units.

Blocking the deal would put a hold on Hungary's plans to import fuel exclusively from Russia. Hungary will now have to negotiate a new fuel contract or pursue legal action against the commission, the newspaper said.

"If the Russians now refuse to modify the original contracts, this will be the end of the road for the project,” said Javor Benedek, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament's Green group, the newspaper reported.

The newspaper said the commission launched a probe into the deal after Budapest awarded the bulk of contracts for two reactors to Rosatom without a public competition.

The European Commission, Euratom and Rosatom could not be immediately reached for a comment.

are politicians. Maybe some report or bill favorable to Centrus is moving through Congress and they are buying LEU today. It could be an addendum to an appropriations bill currently being debated. Congress exempted itself from insider trading rules.

On the other hand, it could be a "fat finger" error where somebody placed a market order for more LEU stock then was available. Always place limit orders for thinly traded stocks.

Finally, the recent rise in stock price may have spooked a big short seller who closed his position and started a short squeeze.

I would LOVE to see LEU close above $5 for a few days. We may actually get some institutional buying!
Congrats to the longs today!

A trade occurs when bid price meets ask price (I'm sure you know that). A wide spread between bid and ask means no shares are currently being exchanged. Sunday afternoon the bid is $4.01 and the ask is $11. I try to avoid thinly traded stocks.

There are other ways to trade stocks such as black pools and options exercises, but I don't think they affect LEU.

One popular theory expressed on this board is that Silex was a flop but GE won't publicly admit it because the threat of the new ACP becoming essentially worthless will drive LEU into bankruptcy and GE can buy its assets for pennies on the dollar. Shareholders would be essentially wiped out by bankruptcy, so I wouldn't own the stock for that reason.

GE has a lot of influence with the Obama Administration so they may be working behind the scenes to keep the Energy Debt from coming to Centrus's rescue.

On the other hand, the company;s market cap has fallen so much it would be ridiculous for GE to wait longer if it was interested in buying out Centrus.

Basically, once the new plant is built they will have the most energy-efficient enrichment facility in the world. Unfortunately, they are taking so long to build it they run the risk of losing their technological edge.
The company is hoping for a government loan guarentee but the Obama Energy Dept passed it over in favor of wind and solar pojects.
GE owns the rights to the Silex process which is even more energy efficient but may not be practical outside a laboratory. GE pulled the plug on the plant they were building, but Silex remains a threat.
Meanwhile nuclear power has struggled with bad press from Fukushima and cheaper alternatives like natural gas from fracking.

Bottom line, LEU is a lottery ticket. Ignore the pumpers and the bashers.
LEU is a newsdriven stock that rarely has any news.

Physicists are getting antsy. Their most highly prized tool for studying the smallest bits of nature—the Large The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator—has been shut down since the end of 2012 for $163 million worth of upgrades. But within two months it will be back with a vengeance, colliding protons at mind-numbing energies that have never been achieved in a man-made machine. Physicists hope that these energies will be enough to produce new particles or phenomena that expose secrets the universe has thus far been unwilling to give up. In particular, the upcoming run at the LHC could yield evidence for an idea called supersymmetry, which would be upheld if extra particles and dimensions of matter show up—and which would explain many puzzling facets of the cosmos.

The largest machine on Earth, the LHC comprises an underground loop with a circumference of 27 kilometers beneath France and Switzerland. Inside the ring, first opened in 2008, protons sent off in opposite directions accelerate to near light-speed then smash head-on into one another and explode. In the aftermath their energy is converted into mass in the form of particles—some of which are exotic species rarely seen in nature. One such, the Higgs boson, revealed itself at the collider in 2012 after theorists predicted its existence more than four decades earlier. Now scientists are hoping the LHC can reprise the feat and expose more new particles—perhaps even other, heavier versions of the Higgs boson.

LHC’s energy boost might make these new particles accessible. Its protons used to collide at energies of 8 trillion electron volts (TeV), but the machine’s electromagnetic fields will now inject them with more energy, causing them to crash together at 13 TeV.

The idea of powering humanity by gathering an endless supply of solar energy from space has taken a huge step towards becoming a reality. Scientists working for JAXA, Japan's space administration, have announced a major breakthrough in wireless power transmission ... in that they've actually been able to do it with a high degree of accuracy for once. The team reportedly beamed 1.8 kilowatts, enough juice to power an electric tea kettle, more than 50 meters to a small receiver without any wires. Up next: scaling the technology for use in tomorrow's orbital solar farms.

The researchers were able to do so by first converting the electrical signal to microwaves, then beaming them to a remote receiver, and finally converting them back into electrons. This successful experiment is the first time scientists have been able to move electrons over any appreciable distance with such a high degree of accuracy, one JAXA researcher explained to the AFP.

This was much talked about in the '70's but never came to fruition. The program aims to harness the constant supply of solar energy directly from space using orbital solar farms, then beaming it back to Earth (and into a global grid) via microwave transmission. What's more, these orbital arrays would never have to deal with obscuring cloud cover or darkened nights as their terrestrial counterparts do.

Centrus Energy Corp. (LEU) today announced that it has received approval of the Company’s request to transfer the listing of its common shares from the NYSE to the NYSE MKT trading platform. Trading of Centrus’ shares on the NYSE MKT is expected to commence on Monday, March 16, 2015, under its current ticker symbol “LEU.” Centrus shares will continue to trade on the NYSE until that time.

Centrus believes that the NYSE MKT trading platform is a better fit for its anticipated market capitalization and daily trading volume while allowing the Company to maintain its long-term relationship with the NYSE.

On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Corp. announced that it had government approval to build to new reactors in the northeastern province of Liaoning.

The expansion project involves a fifth and sixth reactor at the Hongyanhe nuclear power station.

China's National Development and Reform Commission approved the plant expansion after a four-year hiatus from nuclear plant approvals, including a two-year moratorium that was prompted by the 9-magnitude earthquake that lead to the crippling of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.

The official moratorium on plant approvals in China was lifted in 2012 after safety standards were revised. Construction of plants begun in 2013 involved approvals given before the March 2011 earthquake. Construction also continued at Hongyanhe, where Units 3 is expected to go online this year and Unit 4 is still being built. Units 1 and 2 have been operational since 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Estimates of the chance of a magnitude 8.0 or greater earthquake hitting California in the next three decades have been raised from about 4.7% to 7%, the U.S. Geological Survey said Tuesday.

Scientists said the reason for the increased estimate was because of the growing understanding that earthquakes aren’t limited to separate faults, but can start on one fault and jump to others. The result could be multiple faults rupturing in a simultaneous mega-quake.

Stated another way, the chance of an 8.0 or greater quake in California can be expected once every 494 years. The old forecast calculated a rate of one 8.0 or greater earthquake every 617 years.

“The new likelihoods are due to the inclusion of possible multi-fault ruptures, where earthquakes are no longer confined to separate, individual faults, but can occasionally rupture multiple faults simultaneously,” said USGS seismologist Ned Field, the lead author of the report.

“This is a significant advancement in terms of representing a broader range of earthquakes throughout California’s complex fault system.”

The report says that past models generally assumed that earthquakes were confined to separate faults, The report says that past models generally assumed that earthquakes were confined to separate faults, or that long faults like the San Andreas ruptured in separate segments.

But recent large California earthquakes showed how earthquakes can rupture across multiple faults simultaneously. Many are in the Los Angeles area.

Note: I know they closed San Onofre Nuke Plant. Are their any other nukes in California?

OPEC’s Secretary General Abdalla Salem el-Badri isn't afraid to risk stating the obvious: “If we don’t have more supply [of oil], there will be a shortage and the price will rise again.” Speaking at a conference in Bahrain on Sunday, el-Badri further noted that the collapse in crude prices has hurt the U.S. fracking industry. “Projects are being canceled," he observed. "Investments are being revised. Costs are being squeezed.”
OPEC's Secretary General added that the cartel's decision to keep production intact in the face of falling oil prices "will be left as is" and dismissed speculation the strategy was aimed directly at the U.S. shale industry. "Some also say it was directed at Iran. And Russia. This also is incorrect,” he added.
Of course, maybe it's not any one of those theories but all of them, along with Saudi Arabia's memory of the mid-1980s when it cut production as oil prices fell but lost market share when other OPEC nations didn't follow suit. Either way, it's clear the Saudis are playing multi-level chess and taking a very long-term view.

(Update: Saudi Arabia was prepared to make production cuts in late 2014 but wasn't willing to act unilaterally, says Dan Dicker, author of Oil's Endless Bid and the forthcoming Shale Boom, Shale Bust. "The Saudi oil minister went arould the world in November - including to Venezuela and Russia -- and would've been ready to agree to a production cut if they had gotten some cooperation from some OPEC and non-OPEC states.")

Fascinating to watch a major commodity price collapse. There will be many unintended consequences.

Lasers have staggering range, can attack land or air-based targets and are dirt-cheap to fire, making them ideal for a military with one eye on the budget. Now, Lockheed Martin has worked out that the technology could also be used for stopping a car without resorting to lethal force. The company has been testing out a new fiber-optic laser, called ATHENA, which was able to burn through the engine manifold of a truck that was over a mile away.

For the purposes of the test, the truck had its engine and drive train running, although the vehicle itself was up on props. Rather than causing the engine to explode, as per Hollywood, the truck was simply rendered unable to move. Reading between the lines, perhaps Lockheed believes that the gear will be a useful, potentially non-lethal precaution against explosive vehicles being driven, at speed, towards infrastructure points, guard towers or military bases.

ATHENA is based on Lockheed's earlier ADAM system, which was designed to shoot down enemy rockets while in mid-air. This time out, the hardware used a technique called "spectral beam combining," which involves taking multiple laser modules and pointing them in the same place to create a single, powerful, high-quality laser beam. Now, feel free to disagree with us, but doesn't that sound an awful lot like how the Death Star's main weapon worked?

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Power-producing giant Exelon Corp. (NYSE: EXC) rounded out a phalanx of Illinois lawmakers and business leaders who said Thursday that three nuclear power plants could close unless consumers chip in to reward them for producing environmentally-friendly electricity.
Legislation introduced in the House and Senate would create a financial reward for generators that produce clean energy which doesn't create harmful greenhouse gases. It would cost ratepayers about $2 a month on their energy bills.
It comes a week after another clean-energy proposal was proposed in the General Assembly that supporters say is more comprehensive and works to reduce consumption, something they say the latest version lacks. What will likely follow is a gladiator-style showdown among business, labor, and energy forces during a spring legislative session that has largely been consumed by focus on the state's financial crisis. The Exelon-backed plan was quickly derided as a "bailout" Thursday by a consumer group.
"The nuclear industry alone employs thousands of highly skilled laborers in our state and 8,000 of those jobs could be lost if three of our nuclear plants close," Rep. Larry Walsh Jr., an Elwood Democrat whose district includes many nuclear-plant employees, told a state Capitol news conference.
Backed by lawmakers of both parties and key labor leaders trumpeting jobs, Exelon senior vice president Joseph Dominguez said the initiative would let the company compete with other low-carbon power generators for the financial incentive, including wind, solar, water, and clean coal.
If Exelon's the low bidder in the process, it could use money to keep open nuclear plants in the Quad Cities, Byron and Clinton — and the $1.8 billion in annual economic activity they produce for those communities — Dominguez said. The stations are unprofitable in the face of competition from cheaper natural gas and wind energy.
"What it will help us do is not make profits, but avoid losses"

He's keeping his vow to do everything to keep people from benefiting from lower energy costs.

President Obama on Tuesday followed through on his vow to veto bipartisan-backed legislation authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, marking his first veto of the Republican-led Congress and only the third of his presidency.

The president, in a brief statement, claimed the bill would "circumvent" the existing process for reviewing the pipeline, which would extend from Canada to Texas.

"The Presidential power to veto legislation is one I take seriously," Obama said. "But I also take seriously my responsibility to the American people. And because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures and cuts short thorough consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest -- including our security, safety, and environment -- it has earned my veto."

The decision, while expected, was met with tough criticism from Republicans -- and tees up another showdown with Congress in the coming days as GOP leaders try to override.

A new explanation for a type of order, or symmetry, in an exotic material made with uranium may lead to enhanced computer displays and data storage systems, and more powerful superconducting magnets for medical imaging and levitating high-speed trains, according to a Rutgers-led team of research physicists.

The team's findings are a major step toward explaining a puzzle that physicists worldwide have been struggling with for 30 years, when scientists first noticed a change in the material's electrical and magnetic properties but were unable to describe it fully. This subtle change occurs when the material is cooled to 17.5 degrees above absolute zero or lower (a bone-chilling minus 428 degrees Fahrenheit).

"This 'hidden order' has been the subject of nearly a thousand scientific papers since it was first reported in 1985 at Leiden University in the Netherlands," said Girsh Blumberg, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Collaborators from Rutgers University, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Leiden University, published their findings this week in the web-based journal Science Express, which features selected research papers in advance of their appearance in the journal Science. Blumberg and two Rutgers colleagues, graduate student Hsiang-Hsi Kung and professor Kristjan Haule, led the collaboration.

Changes in order are what make liquid crystals, magnetic materials and superconductors work and perform useful functions. While the Rutgers-led discovery won't transform high-tech products overnight, this kind of knowledge is vital to ongoing advances in electronic technology.

"The Los Alamos collaborators produced a crystalline sample of the uranium, ruthenium and silicon compound with unprecedented purity, a breakthrough we needed to make progress in solving the puzzle of hidden order,"

China’s world-best stock market rally made January the busiest month for IPOs in a year. It also created a bundle of new billionaires.
In the first six weeks of 2015, the world’s second-biggest economy hatched about two dozen billionaires, many of whom are riding initial public offerings that investors are driving to their daily price-trading limits -- a frenzy that harkens back to the IPO market of the late 1990s. Among the high-fliers are an airline, a video-game developer and a drug-store chain. “IPOs have become very hot investment products in China,” said Ronald Wan, chief China adviser at Hong Kong-based Asian Capital Holdings Ltd., a Hong Kong-based corporate advisory firm. “So all the controlling IPO shareholders become very rich afterwards -- they become billionaires.”

I remember when America was called "the land of opportunity" back before we got fundamentally transformed.

Savannah| A couple of tourists from Canada made a surprising discovery while scuba diving in Wassaw Sound, a small bay located on the shores of Georgia. Jason Sutter and Christina Murray were admiring the marine life of the area when they stumbled upon a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb that had been lost by the United States Air Force more than 50 years ago.

The couple from London in Ontario, was on a two week vacation in Georgia and Florida to practise their favorite hobby, scuba diving, when they decided to dive near the shores of Tybee Island. While admiring the plants and fishes near the sea floor, they noticed a large cylindrical item partially covered by sand. They investigated the object and found out that it was actually a sort of bomb or missile, so they decided to contact the authorities.

“I noticed an object that looked like a metal cylinder, which I thought was an oil barrel” says Jason Sutter. “When I dug it up a bit, I noticed that it was actually a lot bigger and that there was some writing on the side. When I saw the inscription saying that it was a Mk-15 nuclear bomb, I totally freaked out. I caught Chritina by the arm and made signs to tell her we had to leave. We made an emergency ascent, went back to shore and then we called 911.”

An unmanned submarine was sent to determine the condition of the bomb, before explosive experts were sent to disarm it. Fortunately, the thermonuclear weapon produced in 1955 seemed in sufficiently good shape for a team of Navy seals to try to defuse it. They successfully deactivated the warhead after hours of strenuous work, allowing the rest of the bomb to be moved.

The delicate recovery operation took more than 48 hours, but the bomb was finally recovered and transported Mayport Naval Station in Florida. A full set of tests and analysis will now be performed on the warhead to evaluate its actual state and the possible ecological and health hazard that its presence in the bay for 50 years could represent.

(Reuters) - India sealed a nuclear energy agreement with Sri Lanka on Monday, its first breakthrough with the new government of the tiny Indian Ocean island where China has been building ports and highways in a diplomatic push in recent years.

Under the deal, India will help Sri Lanka build its nuclear energy infrastructure, including training of personnel, the Indian foreign ministry said.

Later, India could also sell light small-scale nuclear reactors to Sri Lanka which wants to establish 600 MW of nuclear capacity by 2030, a Sri Lankan official and an Indian analyst said.

The deal came as Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena began a visit to India, his first trip abroad since he swept to power in January, which has provided New Delhi with an opening to repair ties that had become tense under his predecessor.

"The bilateral agreement on civil nuclear cooperation is yet another demonstration of our mutual trust," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a statement.

India had grown increasingly wary of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa's pursuit of closer ties with China, which became a key supporter of the island's economy after its 26-year-civil war ended in 2009.

China has built a seaport in the south of the country and signed a deal to develop a $1.5 billion port next to the commercial port in Colombo, raising fears Beijing is seeking influence in the island state with which New Delhi has had historical ties.

Ties worsened further after the Rajapaksa government allowed Chinese submarines to dock last year.

Modi said the two countries also agreed to expand defence cooperation, but gave no details. "This is my first visit and it has given very fruitful results," Sirisena said.

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